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December 10, 2013

I saw a reference, in a newsletter I received by snail mail, to a blog by a woman who has a child with disabilities. I went to have a look, read half a dozen or so posts, and posted this myself as a comment:

I discovered this blog today, and there are so many things I could say, in addition to “Yes!” But what I wanted to mention is what I guess has been my version of “no points for style.” (My apologies if I should have put this comment elsewhere.)
I screamed my way through a premature labor — too early in the pregnancy to have taken the labor class and no pain meds allowed for a premature birth. (The baby died shortly after birth, and I have to say that at least I didn’t have to wonder if meds contributed to that.) As I have attempted to be a widowed parent to two (adopted) children who have struggled mightily since their father’s death, I have thought that I feel as though sometimes I get through it by metaphorically screaming my way through it, like that painful labor. Someone I go to occasionally for guidance uses the metaphor of birthing for why I am finding my situation so hard, and that acknowledgement that it is that painful, and that just getting through it is enough, helps me a lot.

The Freedom of Not Knowing

Meditation 32 of 52

Prayer is largely just being silent: holding the tension instead of even talking it through, offering the moment instead of fixing it by words and ideas, loving reality as it is instead of understanding it fully. Prayer is commonly a willingness to say “I don’t know.” We must not push the river, we must just trust that we are already in the river, and God is the certain flow and current.

That may be impractical, but the way of faith is not the way of efficiency. So much of life is just a matter of listening and waiting, and enjoying the expansiveness that comes from such willingness to hold. It is like carrying and growing a baby: women wait and trust and hopefully eat good food, and the baby is born.

I sometimes feel as if I am in an energy stream, kind of like being under a waterfall, and the energy flows through me and comes out one way; and the people I come into contact with have the same energy flowing through them, too, and it comes out another way through them.